A mom’s word-of-mouth recommendation is considered golden to companies. An effective review can provide honest feedback, get a brand’s name out there to those who make purchases, and even change opinions about certain products. It’s no wonder that many companies and PR agencies set aside a certain budget to work with bloggers – we provide a great advertising platform! The problem though, is that unless you have one of the bigger name blogs, you might need to reach out and pitch to said companies in order to be a part of the reviewing world.

You’ve learned how to write the perfect pitch letter, but do you know where to send it to? I’ve seen many bloggers lately asking for contacts, or pitching via a customer service contact form. While the former may be a nuisance to public relations managers (and illegal: never give out an email unless you have consent from the owner) – the latter can prove to be ineffective as well. That’s why I want to teach you how to find the right contact for your review request.

Now, the first thing to remember is that Google is your best friend. The first thing you should do is figure out what company you want to pitch to. For the sake of this tutorial, let’s say you want to review baby shoes.

Go to Google and type in Baby Shoes Reviews Blog. This will give you results with “Baby Shoes,” “Reviews” and hopefully, other blogs that have worked with baby shoe companies. The reason for this is to try and find companies that are blog-friendly. I like to go up to Search Tools>”Anytime” and change the time frame to “Past Year.” This will bring up results that have been posted within the last 12 months.

The first result that popped up was for Robeez Footwear, so that’s going to be where we start. Depending on the type of product you are looking for, you may need to dig a little deeper in the results.

Next, you’ll want to visit the website for whatever company you’ve decided on. In this case, we’ll go to the Robeez site. Most brands have a whole slew of links in their footer, and sometimes you can find exactly what you need there. With this site, they have a “Contact Us” link. Click that.

On the next page, you’ll want to look for “Press Inquiries,” “Media Contact,” or something along those lines. Robeez, along with many other companies, have the main media contact listed right there on their Contact page:

Now, for example’s sake – let’s pretend that we couldn’t find the contact information directly on their website. Next, you would want to return to Google and type in Robeez Press Release. Most press releases list contact information from the marketing manager.

There’s all kinds of tricks to searching through Google that can help you narrow down your results. For instance, if you were getting too many results from a specific website, you could type in “-Website” For our example, let’s say that Robeez press release brought up many Amazon results. You would want to type in Robeez Press Release -Amazon to eliminate the any results that contain the keyword “Amazon.”

PRNewswire is a great site to see recent press releases (within the last 180 days) and you can search for specific terms.

Finding the right person to email can sometimes be the one thing that sets you apart from tons of other requests, and can give you an edge on your reviews. Good luck, and happy pitching!